Clockwise from bottom left, brothers Rodney, Cory, Kevin and Reggie look on as mother Ruby holds a picture of Tim Cole, who died in prison on Dec. 2, 1999, before DNA evidence could exonerate him for a 1985 rape in Lubbock.

Ruby told Tim all about the letter. A man named Jerry Wayne Johnson was promising to confess to the rape that kept her eldest son behind bars for 13 years.

There was a lot of work still to do, Ruby told her son. They'd have to prove Johnson's claims, somehow, and no one knew if that was possible. But there was hope enough for the 71-year-old woman.

Eight years had passed since prison dust and Tim's asthma killed him. For the first time since his death, his family really believed there was a chance to clear his name.

"When you have a child, there are commitments you make to them, promises," she said later. "And we try to keep every last one of them."

Her small frame paused as she pushed up from the ground next to Tim's headstone. Ruby's voice barely carried past her lips.

"It's going to be OK," she told her son.

The letter

Six years had passed since 2001, when a judge dismissed Johnson's attempted confession to the crime that imprisoned Tim. Only five had passed since legislators granted Texas prisoners access to post-conviction DNA testing.

Johnson tried again, from his cell near Snyder, to alert Tim Cole to his confession. He figured Tim would be

out of jail on parole now. Johnson's mother found an address for Ruby, and the prisoner wrote a letter addressed to Tim Cole on May 11, 2007.

"I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of," Johnson wrote. "If this letter reaches you, please contact me by writing so that we can arrange to take the steps to get the process started. Whatever it takes, I will do it."

Tim's brother Rodney thought the letter was a sick joke when he first saw the envelope in the mailbox. Then he began reading and shouting for his mother.

"My husband left this earth with the same prayer that I've had all these years," Ruby said. "That one day, maybe somebody would own up to it. Now that's what this said in this boy's letter."

But the confession posed its own problems. Johnson's word was not enough to overturn a jury verdict; that required hard evidence, like a DNA test. No one knew if testable material existed from a 23-year-old case.

There was another problem. If the claim was true, then Lubbock was about to enter untested legal waters.

Lubbock County has performed half a dozen post-conviction DNA tests, District Attorney Matt Powell said. All were on living prisoners, and all confirmed the original verdict.

Experts are aware of no posthumous DNA exoneration in the state of Texas. State law offers no clear instructions as to how to handle such a problem. Because there was no one to free, the county was under no obligation do anything regarding the case.

From the stands of a Little League baseball game last spring, Powell promised to find the truth behind the letter. If there was a way to prove Johnson was lying or honest, the office would find an answer, he said.

"If one innocent person is put in the pen, that's a travesty of justice," Powell said.

The ecstatic family began contacting media outlets, including the Avalanche-Journal. Johnson learned Cole had died from the reports that followed.

"When I read in the report that Mr. cole had died in prison in 1999, I cried and felt double guilty, even though I know the systems at fault," Johnson wrote to a reporter two weeks later.

"A day later, I am still bothered, terribly, by the death revelation. Because, not knowing Mr. Cole at all, I wonder if the wrongful incarceration contributed to his death."

Tim is gone

Tim died Dec. 2, 1999, a grown man felled by a childhood disease.

Prison conditions took their toll on his asthma. He never managed more than three years without a trip to infirmary units or the Galveston hospital throughout his 13-year prison stay. Lifelong breathing problems his brothers thought Tim conquered by college killed him.

Ruby learned a day later, having missed the chaplain's calls the day Tim died. Kevin took the call for his mother, and immediately called Cory at work.

"All I could hear in the background was screaming," Cory said. "They just said, come home.'"

Reggie would hear the news from another prison chaplain. Struggling with drug and alcohol problems he hid from his older brother and guilt over Tim's arrest he concealed from his family, the middle child was nearing the end of a five-year drug sentence.

He remembered praying on the walk to the chaplain's office that his mother was all right. He sat down and saw Kevin's name on a sheet of paper on the chaplain's desk. So the news about Tim stunned him.

"That was the worst day of my life," Reggie said.

Tim's death dashed the little hope the family kept as the year 2000 approached. Feeling their appeals exhausted and resigned to wait for probation, Tim had faith that new technology allowing DNA testing would help prove he couldn't have raped a terrified Tech student in 1985.

In the end, there wasn't time. He went to the grave a rapist in the eyes of the state and whispering neighbors.

His death was a bitter reminder to Ruby of all the things he had missed in his life. He had no wife or children; death certificates and insurance paperwork came to her. She collected, too, his few possessions, including years of letters from his brothers and sister.

"I think about the Sunday I sent them to Lubbock," Ruby said. Tim's defense attorney wanted Tim and Reggie back a day before trial.

"That particular Sunday, I didn't, we didn't fix dinner," Ruby said. "We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I regret that to this day. My child never sat down at the table and had another meal at this house. So many things, stuff like that."

The family's fight continues

Tim's family knew well by the summer of 2007 the speed of justice. They said, over and over, Johnson's letter was proof enough to them Tim had not committed the crime. But they knew they needed stronger proof to clear Tim's name for everyone else.

Lubbock's district attorney's office first pulled records to see if it was even possible that Johnson could have done the crime. George White, a detective on the original case and now administrator for the district attorney's office, helped with the investigation.

The Innocence Project of Texas, a non-profit firm of students and attorneys that work on wrongful conviction claims, interviewed Johnson and checked his background to rule out any connection to Tim's family.

Both groups warned the family and reporters that many inmates make unfounded claims. Both continued to follow the case.

DNA evidence has exonerated 33 inmates so far in Texas, more than any other state. The Dallas area has cleared 19 since 2001. Tim's family watched relieved and happy innocent men on the nightly news in Dallas, where most of the wrongful convictions have been overturned. Many of the cases hinged on the same problems alleged in Tim's case - faulty identification or forensics problems.

Months piled up without news. Updates from the district attorney's office trickled out. Johnson wrote that he'd stopped hearing from Innocence Project staff.

To have hope revived and then delayed again renewed two decades of frustration. The family worried Tim's case had stalled again.

"I know he's deceased," Cory said in February. "That's why it's just more and more important to us. Everybody wants to hear about someone who got out of prison and they're moving on with their lives. Well, we want to hear about someone who didn't deserve to go to prison."

The DNA test

Johnson met with the Avalanche-Journal a few weeks after his letter came to light.

He discussed his memory of the rape and of Tim in a deliberate, matter-of-fact tone. Johnson was critical of the attorneys appointed to handle his own appeals and DNA requests.

He has not explained why he committed the rapes. The girl, he said during an interview at the Price Daniel Unit last June, just happened to be the first to pull into that cold church parking lot in March 1985.

Johnson chuckled when asked what he was doing in the parking lot in the first place. He was working for a rental car company and on sick leave at the time of the attack. He lived and worked nowhere near campus.

"Why?" he asked from behind the thick blue bars of the Price Daniel visiting room. "C'mon, man. I just told you."

But Tim's death and the family's pain troubled him. He wanted to know his discussion of the crime with the media would help the family. He passed along apologies to Tim's mother and to the victim.

"I cryingly regret how I acted against you and I know this apology cannot and will not ever remove the misery and pain my actions caused you to suffer then and now," Johnson wrote about the student he raped. "I just hope and pray that my coming forward and admitting my guilt conveys that I'm truly sorry and seriously remorseful. I am. I wish you well."

The correspondence decried racism, faulty forensic practices in the 1980s and poor legal work he blamed for Tim's treatment and his own failed attempts to prove he was innocent in the rape of a 15-year-old student from 1985. He repeatedly criticized the crime lab work from the era, which he feels should be reviewed.

Johnson grew wary, too, of the investigation of his claims.

Innocence Project staff disappeared, he reported, frustrated. When Lubbock investigators visited him in Snyder to discuss taking DNA samples and see the letters he wrote confessing to the crime, he doubted the truth would come out.

"It was because of their strong interest in wanting the correspondence I possess dating back to 1995 that led me to think that the DA office may be more interested in finding to what extent the case will generate wrongful conviction publicity and what affect it would have on the Lubbock criminal justice system than the cause for the conviction," Johnson wrote.

But the Lubbock district attorney's office was investigating.

Lubbock investigators found evidence from Tim's case gathering dust in the county archives last fall. The Department of Public Safety's crime lab confirmed the material could be tested.

They took two samples, more than needed, from Johnson in April. In May, they quietly received the results of the DNA testing.

Johnson raped the Tech student.

That should never happen'

White and Judge Jim Bob Darnell, the prosecutor in the case, struggled to remember details of the Cole case 22 years after the trial. The case was tried using the best information and techniques available in 1986, both said.

The district attorney's office used today's best techniques available to finally settle the case, White said.

"When this other information came up, we worked hard on that and I hope finally got to the truth of the matter," White said. "Because that's what we was after all the time, was the truth."

When asked if he owed the family an apology, he said he had not yet thought enough about it.

"It's unfortunate the way it happened, but I can't answer that," White said. "You always hope you never get involved in something like this, but things happen."

"There's only one perfect system and one perfect individual," he added. "I don't think here on Earth we have it right yet."

Darnell, now a sitting district judge for more than a decade, did not know whether to apologize, either.

"I always had a great empathy for young women who were placed in that situation," Darnell said. "But on the other hand I feel really bad about what happened to Timothy Cole. That should never happen to anybody."

Cases so heavily based on eyewitness testimony became more rare since the 1970s and 1980s, he said. DNA evidence, though not always available, helped reduce but not eliminate chances of another wrongful conviction.

Darnell kept his faith in the justice system. He was at a loss, though, of what to say about Tim's case.

"There's not a whole lot you can say to the point of someone's life being taken, knowing that probably wouldn't have happened but for the fact that he was convicted," Darnell said.

Powell, Lubbock's current district attorney, was proud his office had determined the truth behind the rapes and frustrated he could not charge Johnson with the crime.

"He's not stupid," Powell said. "Everyone wants to paint him as a good guy, but he's far from it.

"If I could prosecute him, I guarantee that would happen. If I had any legal recourse against him he'd already be indicted."

He was less certain with what he could legally do for Tim Cole. His office had already done much more than the law required, he reminded a reporter repeatedly. Now he was leery of setting the precedent for an unprecedented legal problem.

"If the guy was alive, that would be easier," Powell said. "There's a process in place for that. But because he died, there's no legal process or remedy in place for that.

"We'll do what we can to clear the guy's name."

Texas Innocence Project attorney Jeff Blackburn requested on Friday a court of inquiry be held on Tim's case. The process would use a rarely tapped power allowing a Texas district judge to start an investigation into violation of state laws.

"If we're going to live in a society where the court system operates in a fair way, then it's got to do it across the board," Blackburn said. "They have a right to have a court of record tell them that their son was innocent."

The filing requires a district judge to recommend the hearing. If a Lubbock judge chooses not to, the law allows Blackburn to take the request to any other judge in the state.

"We will go to every single district judge until we find one that thinks something ought to be done here," Blackburn said. "I hope I just mean that rhetorically."

The news finally arrives

Tim's family learned the news confirming what they had long known on a Thursday morning in late June. They filled Ruby's southeast Fort Worth living room with friends and family members who could make the sudden trip to hear the results of the DNA test.

There was quiet relief at first; the satisfaction of knowing that finally, everyone would admit what the family knew about Tim.

But there was a bitterness to the news, too, and echoes of how the family struggled with Tim's death. With the truth out, memories of the trial and Lubbock media coverage of their son and brother, of the investigation that snared Tim, and of the way the case was presented in court bubbled back up.

The brothers faced, once again, all the opportunities Tim wanted for them and never had for himself. Ruby broke down thinking of his death in a jail cell, miles from his family.

They hoped, somehow, through a court of inquiry or through changes in state law, Texas could work to ensure no family ever went through what they suffered.

"The pain, the heartache and the sense of loss - all those things that we've experienced, we don't want for anyone else," Rodney said. "If his death accomplishes that, then his life was not in vain. That's basically our ultimate desire."

There have been signs of healing since Johnson's letter last spring. Rodney has returned to college. Reggie, having confronted what he believed caused his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, is nearing the end of a treatment program and optimistic about a future in Austin.

Ruby, still troubled by Tim's death and his conviction, found the peace and proof she wanted to see in her lifetime.

Reggie found the words for two decades of pain and guilt in a palm-sized brown Bible from the coffee table. He leaned back into the couch next to his mother.

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick," he read from Proverbs. "But when desire comes it is the tree of life. So now that my desire come, me, I can grow like a tree - my family, we can all grow as a tree."